Wikimedia Foundation sends cease and desist letter to WikiPR | Hacker News Reader

Wikimedia Foundation sends cease and desist letter to WikiPR

blog.wikimedia.org

97 pointspatomolina39 comments

I got this email a couple of months ago. The sales pitch, despite being poorly written, is interesting. I have no idea how they got my email address, but my guess is from AngelList.

"Hi,

Shouldn't Grasswire have a full-length, professional page on Wikipedia? Wiki-PR.com can craft you a professional Wikipedia page for the top 2-3 spots in Google Search.

Would you like more information? Please reply. It will be worthwhile. A full-length, professionally written Wikipedia page will drive sales and inform your clients about what you do best.

Your competitors are getting on Wikipedia. Shouldn’t you be on Wikipedia, too?

Best,

Vanessa Embers Sales Consultant

Wiki-PR We Write It. We Manage It. You Never Worry About Wikipedia Again.

Tel: 888-819-0733 vanessa@wiki-pr.com Twitter: @wiki_PR San Francisco, CA

Disclaimer: This is an individual, personalized email sent by a human. But to unsubscribe, simply reply with "unsubscribe" in the email body."

The interesting thing about Wikipedia is that a lot of your ability to post edits without being caught is based on how often you're making edits approved by the Wikipedia community. If it's blatantly spammy or incorrect it will be corrected, but I'm sure there's plenty that slips under the radar, especially for editors with more experience and a lot of edits under their belts.

I got the same email in May from a different sales consultant. I asked for additional information, which named Voxer and two other companies as clients and provided the following pricing:

Pricing

Wikipedia Page Creation - $1500 Includes research, writing, client review, editing, and uploading to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Page Management - $49/month (optional) Includes ongoing updates to your Wikipedia page, removal of any flags added to your page, and a money-back guarantee that your page will not be deleted by the Wikipedia community.

I ignored that email, but the sales consultant checked in with me later. This was my response:

"Thank you for checking in. I understand the value of your service.

However, if we were to go after a wikipedia page these days, we would probably make the attempt on our own.

I realize that your expertise could more efficiently get a page up and ensure it has the necessary elements to stay up. However, we aren't spending money on marketing right now. We're spending it on product development.

Our hope is that by continuing to prove the value of our service, and by surfacing greater publicity and user traction, creating a wikipedia page and having the necessary attention to have it be upheld will become less of a challenge for us.

Again, I appreciate the check in, I hope you understand our circumstances."

The sales consultant responded with an offer to discount page creation by $500 if we did it by the end of the month. I politely declined.

We still have not taken the step of building a wikipedia page for our startup, and instead have continued to focus on making it notable.

EDIT: I think it is worth mentioning that at the time I did think our company was notable enough to get a wikipedia page. I also thought that done ethically, it was potentially reasonable to pay for someone who is an expert at this to do so. But I did not realize doing so would be against TOS.

I myself created and edited pages on Wikipedia for fun (mostly new albums for bands and music labels) I know there is some art to making something that passes editor muster.

> We still have not taken the step of building a wikipedia page for our startup, and instead have continued to focus on making it notable.

Do you not know about Wikpedia's policies? You should probably not create a wikipedia page for your own product. If you become notable someone else will do it for you. You have a major conflict of interest, and thus you should just not do it, and you should probably not edit it either if one is ever created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ASpam#Advertisement... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(organiza...

> We still have not

> We still have not taken the step of building a wikipedia page for our startup, and instead have continued to focus on making it notable.

Wikipedia admin here. This is the right way to go about it, though I would add "making it notable" doesn't just include product work, but includes generating press about your startup. Especially if you can get something more mainstream than tech press like TechCrunch, The Verge, etc.

Old, former Wikipedia admin here. Unless things have changed, I would strongly advise against paid editing, nor would I allow an employee to directly edit any articles directly related to your company.

If someone does make an article, noting stuff on the talk page (with full transparency) is fine.

Hey David, I wouldn't count that as direct editing :-) TBSDY

By sending a cease and desist letter, wikimedia puts the situation squarely in that discussed by the US district court in the Craigslist v. 3Taps case.[1] In rejecting a motion to dismiss, the court in that case found that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which provides criminal and civil penalties for "intentionally access[ing] a computer without authorization or exceed[ing] authorized access" covers accessing a website after being sent a C&D letter by changing IP addresses to evade an IP ban.

While the aforementioned decision was only on a motion to dismiss and in any event was at the trial rather than appellate level, nonetheless if I were wiki-pr's lawyers I'd caution them strongly not to violate the the C&D.

[1] http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Order-Denyi...

That is a well written demand letter. It is reasonably cordial in tone but it is firm and leaves no doubt what the "public relations" company is expected to do and why. My only thought, as a Wikipedian, is WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG? This kind of abuse of Wikipedia's reputation by violating Wikipedia's terms of service has been going on for years, and even if this group of paid meatpuppets is driven from the site, there are still thousands of articles on Wikipedia that are edited for personal advantage by people who desire to publicize their products or services. I basically can't count on any article about a psychological or genetic test on Wikipedia to be neutral, for example, because people are in the business of publishing or distributing those tests, and other people are in the business of administering them. To date, there are still far too few Wikipedia articles that are based on neutral sources such as graduate-level textbooks (preferably used in combination, to detect any bias that might be in one or another of those) and long-form journalism.

The only Wikipedia article I can recommend (barely) so far is one I have done a lot to edit.[1] It still needs a lot of work, as does just about every other one of the 4,381,166 articles on English Wikipedia. Editing every Wikipedia article to that standard takes a lot of work, and most people don't like to do that much work as volunteers without getting paid, but would rather edit to promote their hobby or their pet cause, or edit to promote their business.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification

The WMF legal department, prefer "get it precisely right" to "get it done quickly".

In the more general case, WMF finds it difficult to act on on-wiki editorial problems for Section 230 immunity.

This statement says that wiki-pr was in performing "paid advocacy." I looked at the Terms of Use for Wikipedia and this company seems to be in violation of some or all of this portion:

Engaging in False Statements, Impersonation, or Fraud

- Intentionally or knowingly posting content that constitutes libel or defamation;

- With the intent to deceive, posting content that is false or inaccurate;

- Attempting to impersonate another user or individual, misrepresenting your affiliation with any individual or entity, or using the username of another user with the intent to deceive; and

- Engaging in fraud.

Looking at the cease and desist letter, it appears the real issue here is not that they were being paid to create or maintain wikipedia articles, but that the content was not neutral and that editors did not self-declare their status as paid but rather unaffiliated internet users.

You're absolutely allowed to be paid to edit articles. Many large organizations employ people for specifically that purpose. However, those who do so legitimately will make it clear both through their username and their userpage that that's what they're doing. The community then takes that into account when determining whether their edits are appropriate.

You are absolutely not allowed to be paid to edit articles!

Sorry, you're right. I misremembered. You can't directly edit articles in which you have a conflict of interest, however you can (and are encouraged to) request edits on the talk page, provide sources, write drafts, etc. Often these paid editors will have experienced volunteers they collaborate with who work with them to ensure the proposed edits meet Wikipedia's guidelines. It's a sort of hands-off editing by proxy, but there very much are paid editors working on articles about their employers -- they just don't edit the articles directly.

Agree completely with this. That is the most transparent way of going about things.

    As we have discussed with you previously, we have come to
    the opinion that , based on the evidence we have to date,
    that agent(s) of your company have engaged in sockpuppetry
    or meatpuppetry to, among other things, make it appear as
    if certain articles are written by unbiased sources when
    in fact those articles are authored by Wiki-PR for money.

I was not expecting to see "sockpuppetry" or "meatpuppetry" in a cease and desist! In general I wouldn't expect lawyers to use company-specific jargon in external communications. What are they trying to do?

They defined the term before using it. It's quite clear what they meant.

This company shows the worse in human beings.

"Let's take one of the best thing human has created to share knowledge and fuck it up and make money while doing it."

To be fair, you could say that about most things. That's part of what keeps us creating though.

So are there legitimate paid articles on wikipedia? Meaning, someone getting paid to write about some (non-spam, non-marketing) topic like how some open source developers get paid.

There's been a recent trend of museums having some of their paid staff contribute to Wikipedia articles relating to the museum's area of interest. Things like writing articles about paintings in the museum's collection, biographies of sculptors who the museum has a large collection of works from, etc. This promotes the museum indirectly (by getting their collection more exposure), but in a way that also aligns with Wikipedia's goals.

There's a fairly organized system to do outreach to such organizations and help them contribute in a positive way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM

There are countless employees/owners of various firms editing their own wikipedia articles on company time. As long as they're providing verifiable, true information and actually making the page better no one really cares.

The issue isn't that this company offered to outsource that so much as that they were consistently promising to create fabrications and biased content.

If you're paid to improve articles for a company, you "are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest) They weren't following that guideline.

Making an article better isn't as big of a deal if have some conflict of interest but aren't directly paid to edit, such as voluntarily editing an article about a product you helped build - you may "make certain kinds of non-controversial edits", like reverting vandalism, correcting typos, and adding references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest...

There are people who write about stuff neutrally as part of their job as an expert in that area. Hence, we usually take care to distinguish "paid editing" from "paid advocacy".

In the real world, these days authors of scientific papers declare "competing interests". If your income depends on it, you had better declare it.

The tobacco industry taught medical science a lesson, but Wikiworld is wacky, and continues to disregard it.

Actually, that's false. There are clear guidelines about disclosing conflicts of interest on Wikipedia (I assume you are referring to Wikipedia when you say "Wikiworld").

There used to be the bounty board: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bounty_board

See Gibraltarpedia on Wikipedia. Whatever one thinks about the idea, the consultant did have balls and sufficient clout on Wikipedia to push the project through.

Isn't circumvention of terms-of-service a felony these days?

No. Lori Drew was acquitted.

For those who want to get it right: the "bright line" guideline is, never touch an article where you have a conflict of interest. (And if you need "conflict of interest" defined for you, just assume you have one, okay.)

This is not a Wikipedia rule, but it is true that if you are caught violating it the media and public will crucify you. And that's probably bad.

Well, it sure is an official guideline [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COI

You confuse guideline with policies. Guidelines have a fair bit if leeway, policies have very little wriggle room. If a policy has wriggle room, it's not been drafted very well :-)

I say that because in my observation of companies' PR disasters after Wikipedia editing, the real-world idea of what constitutes COI is quite a bit broader than Wikipedia jargon "COI". Rules-lawyering doesn't convince the papers.

I've done a bit of work liaising with the nicer variety of PR person who really doesn't want to get it wrong - the above is my general advice in these cases.

Is there any current standard for when a company is worthy of having a Wikipedia page?

This is the official policy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(organizat...

The short version that will cover 95% of cases, though, is that it's less about "worthiness" and more about existence of decent third-party sources you can cite. If a company is discussed in books, articles, etc. that aren't written by the company itself, then an article on the company that cites those sources for its information will rarely cause issues. Actually that applies to just about any topic: a well-sourced article more or less trumps other concerns.

The bigger issue here is that Wiki-PR's articles are exceptionally likely to be biased. Even in cases where the company should have a Wikipedia article, it should be a neutral one, and cover both positive and negative aspects of the company.

Basically, if a third party hasn't created an article about you then you're probably not famous enough yet ;-)

The typical self-written company page gets people like me putting an {{advert}} tag on it.

The typical self-written company page gets people like me putting an {{advert}} tag on it.

You may want to take a look at the actions of an editor who, undeniably, writes mostly about people and places in the part of the world where he lives. Some of the articles, and especially some of the wikilinks to those articles from other articles, for example the link from "Pork pie" to "Michael Kirk (butcher)"[1] look a lot more promotional than anything I would write about people and places in my part of the world, where there are also a lot of active Wikipedians who write mostly about local topics. Maybe it's just volunteer expression of personal opinion, which perhaps is backed up by opinion in reliable sources, but it's an odd-looking editing pattern.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Kirk_(butcher)

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